My Beauty Best Teacher

Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie writes "...The western aid industry is a trap that locks Africans in the chains of dependency. Africans’ initiative, symbolised by diaspora remittance flows, is the key to liberation...The increasing aid flows to Africa that this industry advocates will, at least, “make northern-NGO poverty history”. Who else, after all, will implement all the new projects that will come? This conflict of interest, in which those arguing most loudly for increased aid flows are the aid’s biggest beneficiaries is inherently corrupt and corrupting. We disallow it in other areas of public life; so we should when it comes to the aid industry. The aid industry is helplessly dependent upon seeing an Africa that is incapable, lacking in agency, in permanent need of external direction. If all the flies photographed around those emaciated babies had demanded royalties for their appearances in northern media, Africa would have the richest flies in the world...",Opendemocracy.

In 2003 the ITDG conducted a study on traditional conflict resolution mechanisms in rural Kenya, they found that these "...structures are closely bound with socio- political and economic realities of the lifestyles of the African communities. These conflict resolution structures are rooted in the culture and history of African people, and are in one way or another unique to each community. The overriding legitimacy of indigenous conflict resolution structures amongst these communities is striking..." also"...this study has given due consideration to the unique pastoralists’ cultures that emphasise the resolution of conflicts amicably through a council of elders, dialogue, traditional rituals and common utilization of resources..."

Wafula Okumu writes "...For forty years or so, African leaders have played a pivotal role in derailing the economic and political stability of the countries under their stewardships. In half the period of colonial rule, they have indulged in a reckless game of financial profligacy and violated human rights with impunity. It has now been universally acknowledged that bad leadership has a direct correlation to development of a nation...To be an effective leader is not an easy task as it takes vision, flexibility, knowledge, communication, and hard work. But those who have the desire and the determination to sharpen their wits, hone their skills, and accentuate their virtues can pull away and deftly lead the herd to success. Africans need leaders who will show them where to start and what direction to take in reconstructing their shattered nations. Africans are longing for plain-spoken leaders with charisma and visions to create new, politically and economically vibrant nations that are just and independent...",The Perspective.

Chika Onyeani of Africa Sun Times writes in his provocative book,'Capitalist Nigger' that "...A community cannot survive when its so-called educated citizens are morally and intellectually bankrupt and decrepit. You cannot have a community whose intelligentsia are mere parasites of other cultures...A people which regards itself as independent should be able to produce independent thought. Yet, Africans still depend on Europeans, 40 years after "gaining" their independence from their former colonial masters and at a new millennium, to furnish us with books on any subject. Our so-called elites cannot devote enough time to research to duplicate the same research already conducted and articulate it in a language Africans can understand. It is any wonder then that we go to school and still come out illiterates..."

Donald Ray founder of Traditional Authority Applied Research Network (TAARN) "...is currently leading a novel research project on the role of African traditional leaders in local governance..."they"...are analysing the role and contribution of traditional leaders in education and health reform, and the use of land as a social safety net of last resort. Based on this work, the team hopes to develop policy recommendations that enhance the responsiveness, effectiveness, and equity of selected social policies...the roots of legitimacy for African chiefs are partly pre-colonial historic, partly religious, and partly cultural. The contemporary state's roots, by contrast, include the legal system, the constitution, the nationalist struggle, and democratic elections. "When the post-colonial state attempts different types of development projects, it may leave chiefs out of the picture," he says. "We thought one of the ways to remedy this is to work out mechanisms, where appropriate, to combine legitimacies from both the state and traditional leaders, so there are more appeals to citizens to carry out development programs, whatever those might be...",IDRC.

Richard Dowden writes "...Africa’s winner-takes-all politics lie at the heart of everything that has gone wrong with the continent. It is the reason why it has fallen behind the rest of the world economically, the reason for its wars and poverty...Its roots go back to the creation of African states themselves, the lines drawn on maps by the European colonial powers at the end of the 19th century. The process eventually produced fifty-three states overlaying some 10,000 pre-existing societies and political entities...African states, with a few exceptions, have no common understanding or experience of nationhood. Their flags, national anthems, and identities were created by outsiders. Patriotism, in the good sense of positive loyalty to one’s country and fellow citizens, is in short supply. If you want power, you play the ethnic card or smear your religious rivals. When you achieve power, you bring your own people into government – and even more important, into the army...",OpenDemocracy.

Stephen Thomsen has just published a paper(PDF) on the increasing level of private investment in Africa:
"...Private capital flows to Africa in the form of foreign direct investment (FDI) are growing. While in the past much of this investment was limited to the raw materials sector, the current wave involves firms from more countries and sectors than ever before.
• Foreign investors, including from within Africa itself, invested almost $50 billion in Africa during 2000–03. While this represents only a small share of global flows, the more relevant comparison is with the size of the African economy. By this measure sub-Saharan Africa attracts almost as much FDI as Southeast Asia.
• Although Europe remains the principal source of investment, a rising share is coming both from Asia and from within Africa itself.
• Investors have been influenced by improvements in governance, most notably with respect to the business climate, where the desire to attract foreign investors can provide a strong incentive for African governments to reform their policies and practices. Although much remains to be done, some countries have nevertheless made great progress in areas such as political and economic stabilization, privatization and simplification of cumbersome regulations.
• This foreign investment also has implications for patterns of trade and integration. Many African exports are channelled through multinational enterprises, helping to integrate African countries both with one another and with the global economy.
Via Owen.org

Moeletsi Mbeki deputy chairman of the SA Institute of International Affairs stated that "...The average African is poorer than during the age of colonialism..." with goverments "....wasting money on enormous entourages of civil servants...while China had lifted some 400,000 people out of poverty in the past 20 years, Nigeria had pushed 71 million people below the poverty line...",BBC. Referring to the empowerment/redistribution model in South Africa he makes an observation that is relevant to Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole "...instead of devoting their energies to creating new companies, to creating new products, to providing and creating employment the elite tend to spend most of their time, if not all of their time, looking for redistributing mechanisms to get shares in pre-existing companies. So what you are actually getting is that the brightest among the black people in this country, instead of creating wealth, building up their own companies, are becoming secondary fiddle players to the existing companies...",MineWeb.

Franklin Cudjoe founder of Imani: The Centre for Humane Education writes about Protectionism "...In the 1950s and 1960s, governments of many countries in Africa and Latin America erected walls around themselves in the form of trade barriers. The plan was to enable the industries of these countries to grow, "protected," as it were, from outside competition. What actually happened was that these industries floundered.
Although the industries in these "protected" countries grew for a brief period, the lack of competition meant that their industries became lazy and fell behind the rest of the world in both technological improvement and growth. Also, because imports were expensive or even unavailable, their costs of production rose and they continued to use old and inefficient technologies. Soon these protected industries were producing goods that few people wanted; exports fell dramatically and in many cases the industries – usually run by the cronies of corrupt leaders – had to be subsidized by the state in order to stay afloat...",A World Connected.
Also covered at the Globalization Institute

The Zimbabwe pundit writes about the impact of African Bloggers "...The African blogosphere is a heterogeneous amalgam of blogs not only by Africans and people on the continent as much as it is comprised of blogs that write about the continent. There are many people around the world that write about Africa. This miracle of cyberspace—that it allows for cheap communication unfettered by geopolitical boundaries—has made it possible for the African odyssey to share center stage alongside the big issues in the west, thanks in part to Africa’s bloggers. The latest news from Africa is available to anyone in the world with access to the internet...The hallmark of African bloggers is authenticity. African bloggers are retelling the African story from their authentic perspective with an avid passion for their countries and continent to boot. It is impossible to read the posts on any of the blogs in the African blogosphere and come away without a sense of the writer’s deep connection to the country and continent...According to George Ayittey, the author of Africa Unchained, only eight of Africa’s 54 countries have a free press. Filling the news gap has become a main role the African Blogosphere is playing. After decades of repression during which shot callers in Africa’s often corrupt governments dominated the news, Africa’s bloggers are turning the spotlight on the continent’s real newsmakers; ordinary Africans. At best, these bloggers most likely filling the news gap outside of their repressive countries because of low internet proliferation in many African countries. Very few people, many of them in urban areas, have access to the internet in much of Africa. Consequently, most of bloggers polled for this article reported that the bulk of their readership came from outside of their countries, in the US and Western Europe. However, there are already some exceptions to this in Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa. Most bloggers don’t write exclusively to fill the news gap. In fact, the group of African bloggers I polled overwhelmingly responded that they blog out of their motivation to share their own stories and life experiences..."
Via Committee to Protect Bloggers

Anton La Guardia writes "...While Asia has moved aggressively into manufacturing, Africa languishes as a producer of raw products - such as oil, diamonds, minerals, cotton and sugar. If it is to revive, it not only needs to export more, but has to diversify and add value to its goods...Breaking down the rich world's trade barriers may be important, it said, "but we must underline that these measures will make little or no impact if Africa does not improve its competitiveness"...What is needed is "good governance" - leaders that seek to prevent conflict, create stability, fight corruption, build infrastructure, encourage educated Africans to stay in their countries rather than seek jobs in the West, and give businessmen a reason to invest rather than salt their money away abroad..."

Moeletsi Mbeki writes about the need to unfetter the private sector, it "... consists of the rural poor and of subsidiaries of foreign-owned companies. Neither of which is free to operate in the marketplace because each is dominated politically by non-producers who control the state. This is the weakness of the African private sector that explains its inability to become an engine of economic development. Africa’s private sector lacks political power and is therefore not free to operate to maximize its objectives. Above all, it is not free to decide what happens to its savings...The elite diverts these savings towards its own consumption, and also to strengthen the state’s repressive instruments. Much of what Africa’s elite consumes is imported. So state consumption does not create a significant market for African producers. Instead, it is a major drain on national savings that would otherwise have gone into productive investment. This explains Africa’s growing impoverishment. The more the political elite consolidates its power, the stronger its hold over the state, and therefore the more rural societies sink into poverty and African economies regress... ",Global Agenda.

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong responds to Y. Fredua-Kwateng's question "Are you an internalist or externalist? "...there is no internalist or externalist in the Ghana/African development process debate, there is the confused African elite not trying to grasp all the factors that have contributed to Africa's so-called "agonies," including the long-running exclusion of deeper implications of the African culture in both local and international development planning or thinking in Africa's development process.The Internalists came about because for uncritically long time African elites, for their own benefits against the peoples upkeep, which demonstrated their weaknesses, had blamed the continent's problems on external factors alone without looking at the internal factors that have also contributed to the continent's problems. "Imperialism, Down with Imperialism," said the largely the Externalists' slogans of the 1960s against today's Internalists rantings such as the Dr. George Ayittey-minted "African Solutions for African Problems," which opened up the African development process debate, both locally and internationally, by incorporating the Interenalists' stance. The Internalists are not saying Ghanaians/Africans should separate the internal factors such as predatory elites that have slowed down Africa's progress from the external forces such as the impact of colonialism; what they are saying is that in discussing Africa's problems we have to take note of the internal factors too so as to have fuller understanding of the continent's problems, especially in making policies. This is what South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki is saying in his "African Renaissance" project, and other thinkers such as Dr. George Ayittey, of American University in Washington D.C., and myself are advocatng...",GhanaWeb.

In light of the seemingly endless litany of famine across Sub-Saharan Africa: Ethiopia, Niger, Sudan, Zimbabwe etc. we shall revisit Amartya Kumar Sen's views on the subject "...no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press. We cannot find exceptions to this rule, no matter where we look: the recent famines of Ethiopia, Somalia, or other dictatorial regimes; famines in the Soviet Union in the 1930s; China's 1958-61 famine with the failure of the Great Leap Forward; or earlier still, the famines in Ireland or India under alien rule... Famines are often associated with what look like natural disasters, and commentators often settle for the simplicity of explaining famines by pointing to these events: the floods in China during the failed Great Leap Forward, the droughts in Ethiopia, or crop failures in North Korea. Nevertheless, many countries with similar natural problems, or even worse ones, manage perfectly well, because a responsive government intervenes to help alleviate hunger. Since the primary victims of a famine are the indigent, deaths can be prevented by recreating incomes (for example, through employment programs), which makes food accessible to potential famine victims. Even the poorest democratic countries that have faced terrible droughts or floods or other natural disasters (such as India in 1973, or Zimbabwe and Botswana in the early 1980s) have been able to feed their people without experiencing a famine... Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort...",Journal of Democracy.

Todd Pitman writes "...When aid money keeps coming, all our policy-makers do is strategize on how to get more," said,James Shikwati the Kenya-based director of the Inter-Region Economic Network, an African think tank. "They forget about getting their own people working to solve these very basic problems. In Africa, we look to outsiders to solve our problems, making the victim not take responsibility to change."Moving the aid can be nightmare in itself. Africa's good roads are few, and often pass through the front lines of civil wars. But Shikwati notes an additional problem: Even African countries that have food to spare can't easily share it because tariffs on agricultural products within sub-Saharan Africa average as high as 33 percent, compared with 12 percent on similar products imported from Europe."It doesn't make sense when they can't even allow their neighbors to feed them. They have to wait for others in Europe or Asia to help," he said. "We don't have any excuses in Africa. We can't blame nature. We have to tell our leadership to open up and get people producing food..."

Michael Radu writes "...It does not seem that [Africa's] leaders even accept the notion of responsibility, let alone the idea of using what resources it has to address its own problems...For more than four decades, African elites and their intellectual mentors in the West have comfortably lived with a fiction: that whatever is wrong in the continent—tribalism, corruption, genocide, failing states, poverty, and HIV/AIDS—is somebody else's fault, i.e., the rich West's. Genocide in Rwanda? Blame the Belgians. Rampant anti-Asian racism in East Africa? Blame the British. Even more blatant anti-White racism in Zimbabwe? The British again. A string of spectacularly bloody tyrants, including Idi Amin in Uganda, Bokassa in Central Africa, Macias Nguema in Equatorial Guinea? The really guilty ones are in London, Paris, and Madrid; "Africa" is innocent..."

In 1998 the then Deputy South African President,Thabo Mbeki articulated his hopes for an African Renaissance. "...The time has come that we call a halt to the seemingly socially approved deification of the acquisition of material wealth and the abuse of state power to impoverish the people and deny our Continent the possibility to achieve sustainable economic development.Africa cannot renew herself where its upper echelons are a mere parasite on the rest of society, enjoying a self-endowed mandate to use their political power and define the uses of such power such that its exercise ensures that our Continent reproduces itself as the periphery of the world economy, poor, underdeveloped and incapable of development.The African Renaissance demands that we purge ourselves of the parasites and maintain a permanent vigilance against the danger of the entrenchment in African society of this rapacious stratum with its social morality according to which everything in society must be organised materially to benefit the few As we recall with pride the African scholar and author of the Middle Ages, Sadi of Timbuktu, who had mastered such subjects as law, logic, dialectics, grammar and rhetoric, and other African intellectuals who taught at the University of Timbuktu, we must ask the question - where are Africa's intellectuals today?..."A question as pertinent now as it was then.

Y Fredua-Kwarteng writes "...In the field of development, like any other fields in the social world, things are so interconnected that it is misleading to separate variables neatly into external and internal causalities for the purpose of analysis or solution. In other words, the causes of underdevelopment problems are so complex that that we need a multiple perspectives, approaches, orientations, or lenses in order to find solutions to these problems. In solving underdevelopment problems, we have to understand that human beings are multifaceted beings: they are cognitive, emotional, religious, social and behavioral beings..."

Moeletsi Mbeki recently stated that "...The best way to keep Africans poor is to continue handing money to political elites who suppress development...the Marshall Plan pulled Europe and Japan out of the doldrums that followed WWII because it was driven by the principles of strengthening democratic institutions and free markets. Most African aid, however, has been provided under the erroneous assumption that strengthening the state will lead to development...Concerts and conferences help focus attention on Africa’s extraordinary economic and health-related problems. Even Bono’s group, DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa) demanded that rich nations open their markets, quota and duty free, to African exports, remove agricultural subsidies that hurt African farmers, and allow African nations to harness the power of trade in their own way to maximize poverty alleviation and economic growth...",CFACT.

Peter Lewis reviews 'The Fate Of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to The Heart of Despair; A History of fifty Years of Independence' in his article 'Many hands sowed seeds of Africa's failure' "...With precious few exceptions, postcolonial African countries tanked: sometimes politically, sometimes economically, sometimes socially, sometimes - - horribly and spectacularly -- all three at once. Not only did the center fail to hold, but the windows blew out, the walls caved in, and the roof collapsed... Africa was not the healthiest. Its ground had not been nourished but mauled by the colonial powers that staked their claim to the continent at the end of the 19th century. Areas of interest were demarcated without regard to the diverse and independent groups of Africans living there. People with no common history, customs, language or religion were forced into colonial units. Antagonisms and latent hostilities between groups were ignored...he period of decolonization was far from clean. Meredith describes how European powers sought at the very least to keep a foot in the door to maintain vested interests, like Britain, or left only after being pushed out, screaming and kicking, like Portugal. Whichever, the imprint they left behind was of authoritarian regimes that came on the heels of the feudal power exercised by earlier, local chiefs. "Traditions of autocratic governance, paternalism and dirigism were embedded in the institutions the new leaders inherited."The result was the emergence of one-party states, and even more to the point, of Big Men. The Big Man will be the bugbear Meredith finds squatting upon every rotting African country, and he has plenty of material to back his assertion that "Africa has suffered grievously at the hands of its big men and its ruling elites. Their preoccupation, above all, has been to hold power for the purpose of self-enrichment..."

Via FriendsofEthiopia

Sappor, Godsway Yaw, writes about the failure of African Leadership "...It is not so much the wicked effects of colonialism or neo-colonialism or a regime of artificial borders that keep Ghana and Africa in general, poor. It is true that colonialism did not bestow much to Africa but the African leadership could not retain, let alone increase, the little that it inherited. In fact, corrupt leaders destroyed it. The inherited infrastructure-(roads, brides, schools, universities, hospitals, telephones, and even the civil service machinery) - are now in shambles... Common sense dictates looking both ways before crossing a street, or risk being hit by a truck. For decades, African leaders looked only one way, at "external factors": colonial legacies, the lingering effects of the slave trade, an unjust international economic system, and predatory practices of multi-national corporations, among others, to explain the miserable economic performance of the continent. A lot of studies have already been done about the external factors and it is no secret to say that these factors are beyond the control or manipulation of most African countries on an individual basis. It is therefore a MUST to make an unerring examination of all causative factors, both external and internal, in order to arrive at a lasting solution. “A big obstacle to economic growth in Africa is the tendency to put all blame, failures and shortcomings on outside forces. Progress might have been achieved if we had always tried first to remove the mote in our eyes”... Although it is true that colonialism and Western imperialism did not leave Ghana, for this matter Africa in general, in good shape, the condition has been made immeasurably worse by internal factors such as misguided leadership, systemic corruption, capital flight, economic mismanagement, senseless civil wars, political tyranny, flagrant violations of human rights and military vandalism, among others...",GhanaWeb.